Paved roadways that are built to facilitate vehicular travel are typically resurfaced from time to time as wear and tear caused by several factors, such as fatigue and freeze-thaw cycles, degrades the surface of the roadway. Many paved roadways consist of an asphalt surface course that is supported by a base course comprising one or more layers of aggregate material deposited on a subgrade of native earth material. After the base course is prepared during a road building operation or after the old surface course is removed during a resurfacing operation, fresh asphalt for the new surface course is laid down using a paving machine and compacted to form a strong, smooth road surface. In many cases, fresh asphalt is produced at a plant and delivered to the worksite in haul trucks while the asphalt is still at a high enough temperature to be effectively laid down and compacted. To ensure the paving process is able to run continuously and efficiently, a continuous and steady flow of fresh asphalt must be delivered to the paver. Thus, there are often several haul trucks participating in the asphalt transport process—while some trucks are picking up fresh material, others are already in transit to the paver with fresh material, while others are emptying their payload or have already done so and are returning to the plant.
In many cases, a foreman or other operations manager is responsible for overseeing material transport operations to ensure the paving process runs smoothly. This task includes managing the flow of fresh material between the plant and the worksite to ensure fresh asphalt is constantly available to the paver, while preventing an over-accumulation of asphalt at the jobsite. When the paver is starved of fresh asphalt, the paving process must be paused, which can cause a chain of events that reduce the efficiency of operations. For example, when the paver stops, compacting operations behind the paver must stop, and road milling operations ahead of the paver may be required to stop (e.g., to avoid milling more road surface than can be repaved in the remaining work time). Idle time reduces efficiency and is often avoided where possible. On the other hand, when too much fresh asphalt accumulates at the worksite, a queue of haul trucks may develop, which can create inconveniences at the worksite and reduce the overall efficiency of the operation (i.e., resulting in idle trucks waiting to dump their payload). Additionally, the hot asphalt in each truck constantly cools over time, and if trucks are required to wait in line too long before dumping their payload (i.e., before the asphalt is used in the paving process), the asphalt can cool below an acceptable usable temperature and may have to be discarded, which is wasteful and costly.
A system for controlling paving process operations is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 8,930,092 that issued to Minich on Jan. 6, 2015 (“the '092 patent”). In particular, the '092 patent discloses a system for monitoring and controlling paving operation that incorporates an integrated trucking logistics process, an integrated yield process, and an integrated quality control process. The integrated trucking logistics process involves identifying when trucks encounter “witness points” along the delivery and return paths between a plant and a worksite to facilitate estimating the arrival time of the truck at the worksite in conjunction with a commercial traffic monitoring system. When a truck delivers material to a paver, the material delivered is associated with that truck, and the truck is “released” from the paver. The empty truck is added to an inbound manifest of the plant, and an estimated time of arrival of the truck at the plant is determined. This information is used to control paving speed, plant production rate, and shipping rates.
While the system of the '092 patent may allow for arrival times of trucks to be estimated at the worksite and the plant, it may not be optimum. In particular, the system of the '092 patent may be limited to observing trucking operations for purposes of controlling paver and plant operations. Further, the system of the '092 patent may ultimately rely on the foremen to observe trucking operations and to communicate those observations, which can be a burden on the foreman.
The truck process management tool of the present disclosure solves one or more of the problems set forth above and/or other problems in the art.